5 Things to Talk About This Weekend

Mad Men wraps up, dinosaur chickens are just getting started.

1. Letterman and Mad Men wrap up this weekIt’s the end of not one but two TV eras this week, as David Letterman bids farewell to late night after more than three decades on the airwaves this coming Wednesday. The legendary talk-show host will end as he began way back in 1982—with the always-entertaining Bill Murray in the guest chair. Midcentury drama fans, meanwhile, are steeling themselves for the last episode of Man Men this Sunday night. Will Don Draper go off to that creative department in the sky? Will Letterman give us a top ten list to end all top ten lists? Whatever happens, TV will never be the same after next week. [Uproxx][Rolling Stone]

2. Curiosity watches the sun set on MarsWhat color is the sunset on the Red Planet? Blue, for some crazy science reason. This week, NASA’s Curiosity Rover spent a solo romantic evening watching the sun go down over the Martian landscape. The stunning blueness of the sunset, which is similar to what the human eye would see, is due to the way light is refracted through motes of dust. How into it did Curiosity get? So into it that the little robot tweeted a quote from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” alongside its photo of the scene. [Washington Post]

3. More than 100,000 players kicked off of World of WarcraftBlizzard Entertainment laid down the law this week in its hugely popular MMORPG, laying a six-month ban on a 100,000+ gamers who have been using automated programs to cheat the system. And it ain’t just the giant bot factories kicking an unfair amount of ass in player vs. player—even those who have exploited the system to streamline potion crafting got booted. That’ll teach you to bring a robot to a mage fight. [PC Gamer]

4. Scientists create dinosaur-chicken hybrid horror babyAs a species, we can all pretty much agree on the fact that we’re better off without dinosaurs (no matter how badass Chris Pratt looks when he’s herding Velociraptors). But a team of Yale and Harvard researchers are playing God just like Michael Crichton warned us not to, creating a chicken embryo that has the face of a prehistoric hell beast. The Frankensteining was done in the name of figuring out how dinosaurs evolved into modern birds—which is all well and good, until the electric fences short circuit. [BBC]

5. New Zealand holds national flag-design contest, shit gets weirdAfter years of complaints that New Zealand’s flag is too similar to Australia’s, the little country that could is holding a referendum to rethink its design. In a true show of democracy, the government has set up a website for the public to submit ideas for what the future flag should look like. The Internet being the Internet, some of the ideas have gone to the strange place. Among the MS Paint-y designs are a group of red things frolicking in front of a rainbow, a kiwi bird shooting lasers out of its eyes and a lamb next to an ice-cream cone. Never change, NZ.[The Guardian]